Marino, B. F. 1 , Borghi, A. M. 2, 3 & Riggio, L. 1
1 Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Parma, Italy
2 Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy
3 Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR, Roma, Italy
Recent behavioural and brain imaging studies have shown that understanding nouns of graspable man-made objects triggers the activation of motor programs for hand movements associated with both object prehension and object use (i.e. structural and functional affordances). Here, we investigated whether functional and structural affordances evoked by those nouns can be selected in accordance with the goal of the action sequence expressed by the sentences in which the nouns are embedded. To this end, 34 participants were presented with sentences obtained by combining the noun of familiar tools with a verb pair expressing different action goals (i.e. grasping-to-move, grasping-to-use, looking-to-grasp and looking-to-stare). Participants decided whether the tool mentioned in the sentence was the same as that displayed in a following picture. We found that accessing the meaning of a tool noun activates a set of motor programs for hand movements in accordance with the specific action goal expressed by the verb pair. Specifically, functional affordances are activated only by the grasping goal related to tool use. This pattern of result is in keeping with embodied theories on language and with the idea of a chained activation of the motor system during action sentence understanding.